The promises, poetics and politics of verticality in the really high African city

Abstract

This article is an attempt to foreground considerations in African cities of three-dimensional urbanism, or what Eyal Weizman has called the ‘politics of verticality’. Through analysis of the work of three builder/artists the article resists a strain of persistent horizontality in African urban studies. The focus of this article is on three specific urban forms which are contested in interesting and provocative ways. The first, the Tower, in Limete Kinshasa is simultaneously a built form, an imagined space, a set of processes, a film and a theoretical proposition for Filip de Boeck and Sammy Baloji. The second structure is a radical reimagining of Bodys Isek Kingelez’s childhood agricultural village as a megacity of cardboard skyscrapers, paper parks and polystyrene promenades. Kimbembele Ihunga (1994) is a three-by-two-meter ‘extreme maquette’ in which Kingelez presents an unbuildable city which is nevertheless intended in all seriousness as a visionary proposal for post-independence African urbanism. The third structure is a literary residential high-rise, the Maianga Building in Luanda. Ondjaki’s novel, Transparent City (2018) presents the biography of a building in a general state of decay but which is, counterintuitively, not a burden to its residents; in fact, its idiosyncratic dysfunction offers some promising, pleasant and useful affordances.